Interview with Nathaniel Rich

Pierce Stanley and Lucy Tang sat down recently with Nathaniel Rich, an editor at The Paris Review and author of The Mayor’s Tongue, a debut novel The Los Angeles Times has called “imaginatively folkloric.” Stanley and Tang, undergraduates at Columbia, spoke with Rich about his novel and about the unique challenges and joys of writing fiction.

Brink: Thank you very much for having us. It’s a pleasure to be here and to speak with you. We’ll start the interview with the book, The Mayor’s Tongue. The novel was very good, and it was a great debut.

Nathaniel Rich: Thanks—it took a long time to write, about five or six years. I worked on it in total secrecy for most of that period, and while I was working on it I always had other jobs, and was living in different places. There was never a sustained period where I sat down and wrote the whole novel. It was something like a process of accretion. That said, nothing in the book came about in a haphazard way—for the first two years I worked on the book, much of what I was doing was writing an outline, and planning the novel’s structure. At the beginning there was way too much planning—not enough writing. I blame it on nerves.

Brink: Is that why there is a parallel structure to the work? Is that why there are two narratives in the novel? It is sort of bizarre how the parallel stories never meet. Which came first? How did all that come about?

NR: There are a couple reasons why I decided to have two storylines that paralleled each other but did not intersect directly. I’m certainly not the first person to use that device, by the way. A lot of books that I love do it. I wanted two different characters to confront a similar problem from totally different stages in their lives. I felt that the two perspectives would allow me to explore the book’s central themes—which have to do with failures of language and communication—in a deeper, more intimate way. I decided early on that I didn’t want the characters themselves to meet. The idea of Mr. Schmitz and Eugene, say, hanging out in Trieste, seemed preposterous to me, a copout. I worried that a contrivance like this might distract readers from thinking about why there were two narratives in the first place. My hope is that the two stories interact in a more meaningful way than simply on the level of plot.

Brink: Something that is interesting about The Mayor’s Tongue is that most of the relationships are between two people. Why does the book focus so deeply on just a couple of relationships between two people, rather than groups of three or four?

NR: The most intimate and intense relationships are those with two people. I wasn’t concerned with group dynamics in this book. At its core, this book is about the deep desire that we all have to communicate the people with whom we’re closest—whether it be a friend, parent, lover, or spouse. We want to share our deepest thoughts and feelings, but in trying to do so, we’re constantly failed by the limitations of language. So throughout the book, there are characters that want to express something urgently to another person, but are thwarted by language and have to find an alternate means of communication. The best way to dramatize this problem is in a relationship between two people. A scene with two people usually presents stronger dramatic possibilities.

Brink: You said you started the project five or six years ago. Was there an event that inspired you to go on this course of thought?

NR: I studied Italian throughout college, and became perfectly obsessed with Italy. The summer before my senior year I got a very strange job at a huge publishing company based right outside of Milan, called Mondadori. When I got there, my mother was concerned that I had a proper place to stay. So I found a little pensione in Milan. It turned out that all of the other apartments were leased out to modeling agencies that crammed five girls into one apartment . . . in retrospect I should have embraced this opportunity. At the time I realized my room was extraordinarily expensive and I felt trapped. On my first day of work, I got in at nine o’clock. There was only one other guy in the office, a young editor named Francesco. We soon figured out that we had the same taste in books. I explained that I was staying at this ridiculous place, and right away he asks me if I’d like to stay at his apartment. I took him up on the offer. I was unsure of exactly what he had in mind, but I figured it was my only chance to escape my pensione. As it turned out, he had no ulterior motive besides wanting to practice his English. Francesco spoke pretty poor English. My Italian was decent, not great. I wanted, of course, to improve my Italian, but since he’d only speak to me in broken English, my Italian didn’t get any better, and my English got worse. It devolved to the point where we’d have conversations using mostly nonsense words. We probably looked like insane people as we rode around Milan on his Vespa, yelling gobbledygook back and forth to each other.

The whole scenario got me thinking about language and communication and the problems that ensue—not only when you are trying to speak in another language, but also when you’re speaking with someone in your own language (especially, at least in my own experience, if that someone is a girl). The novel is not particularly autobiographical, but the prologue, which is about the relationship between Alvaro and Eugene, is an embellishment of my relationship with Francesco. The two characters feel that they understood each other in a very clear way, but in truth they probably have no idea what the other one is saying.

Later that same summer I had a grant to go to Trieste to do research on the Italian novelist Italo Svevo, who was the subject of my senior literature thesis. His masterpiece is Zeno’s Conscience, which is one of my favorite books. A young James Joyce was his English teacher at Trieste’s Berlitz school. I was in Trieste for two weeks and during that time I was totally isolated. I didn’t know anyone, and I became fascinated with the city. I think I might have gone a little crazy, and I wandered around the city for hours. I did finally make friends with the bellhop at the little hotel where I was staying and one night he took me up into the Carso, the strange, mysterious mountainous region above the city that lies along the Slovenian border. I was totally captivated by it, and the Carso ultimately became the setting for the last third of The Mayor’s Tongue.

Trieste has an unusual mix of different cultures and languages. Signs are in Italian and Slovenian and even German, though locals speak their own dialect, Triestino, which no one else understands. There was even an Esperanto festival in Trieste while I was there. These ideas about language were already in my head, so it wasn’t long before I realized that Trieste had to be the setting for a novel about language and about language confusion. But I didn’t start writing the novel until after I graduated, a year later. I ended up writing most of it when I was living in San Francisco, where I moved a couple years after that. During this whole period I was making notes, thinking about the book, and picking up little things here and there.

Brink: Why all the secrecy?

NR: Insecurity and fear, most of all. At first I didn’t know whether what I was writing was going to work as a novel. I thought it might be too crazy. (As it turned out, a lot of what I was writing was, in fact, completely insane. A major part of my editing process was to cut out a lot of divergent subject matter that had nothing to do with the book.) I didn’t want to end up being the guy at the party who’s always talking about the novel he’s writing, and I didn’t want people to keep asking me about it, because I knew it would take years to finish. It would be too embarrassing if it didn’t work out. I don’t think it’s uncommon for young writers to have a sense of embarrassment about writing before they’ve published anything.

There was another reason I didn’t talk about it. I wanted the book to be its own cohesive, hermetic universe. I thought it’d be disruptive to let in too much light from the outside world, to listen to opinions from other people. I didn’t want reality to impinge upon it too much. I thought that would be too destructive. But that’s probably another fancy way of saying that I was just really insecure.

Brink: Constance Eakins seems like a real writer. When you read the book you don’t get the sense that he is a creation of your imagination. How did it seem to be writing in such a voice?

NR: I wanted there to be an Oz-like character lurking in the background, someone like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, who is at the center of the novel and influences its characters in a profound way but doesn’t actually show his face until the end—and then is only something of an afterthought. I imagined a magnetic, huge, intimidating, frightening, exciting force. A dark energy that exerts a pull on all the novel’s other characters. Because of the subject of this novel, this character had to be a writer. So Eakins is a pastiche of every terrifying and great author of the 20th century. I combined all of the most horrifying and absurd attributes of people like Salinger, Pynchon, Nabokov, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Mailer, also Orson Welles and Werner Herzog. Constance Eakins is the monstrous lovechild of all these maniacs.

It was a lot of fun—so much fun, in fact, that the legend of Eakins became the premise behind the book’s website. The website enlarges the Eakins myth in a way that the book itself wouldn’t have been able to sustain. I know, because I tried it—originally I had planned on a third parallel story about Eakins’s life, but soon realized that it was completely preposterous and self-indulgent.

My favorite novels are those that make me feel like I’ve entered a new world, a whole other realm that is similar to my own but different and stranger and more exciting. Eakins was a way for me to try to achieve that.

Brink: Are some of your bigger literary influences in Eakins?

NR: Not all of the writers I named are important to me as writers, though some of them are. It’s important, in the novel, that Eugene is both terrified and awed by Eakins. That’s the way I feel about a lot of the writers that I most admire. Any young writer has to reckon with his idols in some way. Usually he tries to destroy them, or to improve on them, as futile as such an effort might be. But you have to reckon with them one way or another—they’re the figures that make up the landscape, that form the tradition you’re trying to join. You have to take what these writers have given you and twist it into something new and unique, albeit, in all likelihood, inferior.

Brink: Who is your Constance Eakins?

NR: When I was writing this novel there were certain novels that were important to me, which I stole from as much as possible. The big one was Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which may be my favorite novel. Bulgakov uses the two-story device. I was fascinated and galvanized by the idea of two stories that had nothing to do with each other, yet had a kind of dialogue between them on the page. There’s an electricity between the two stories, despite their different settings, characters, and subject matter. That’s the effect I was trying to recreate with the two stories in The Mayor’s Tongue.

Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds, which I read that summer in Trieste, is the funniest book I have ever read. I remember reading it at the Trieste train station, sitting on my duffel bag waiting for the train, and hysterically laughing to myself. All of these commuters were looking at me like I was insane, which I might have been. O’Brien has a whole conceit about characters plotting to murder their author so they can escape into the world. That was obviously something that was influential. Alice in Wonderland has always been very important to me. Charles Dickens too. In Bleak House, Dickens uses two narratives, and sets one in the present tense and the other in the past tense. I didn’t even realize he was doing this until page 750, because the device had worked so successfully, and subtly, to give each narrative a different sound. That’s something I picked up from him. There are a ton of other writers I read for the way they combine words, in particular a lot of 20th century novelists.

Brink: The Mayor’s Tongue is as much about cities and the energy between really different places as much as it is about the energy between two different characters of two different stories. What are the challenges of comparing cities as opposed to characters?

NR: It’s true, a big part of the book is about the relationship between the individual and the city. The novel moves from New York City to Milan and Trieste, and finally to the mysterious mountainous region of the Carso. There is a reason for that. Growing up in New York, I’ve always associated the city with order and rationality. I knew that I wanted the book to move gradually away from those things. In order to do that, I needed the characters to leave the city. So they move from the real neighborhoods of Inwood, Midtown, and the Upper West Side to cities or towns of the imagination. They discover Idaville, for instance, a village ruled by a despotic and ravenously hungry Mayor.

Brink: What are the challenges of moving from writing criticism, more nonfiction type work, to writing a novel? Does the thought process or creative process change or is it much of the same.

NR: I’ve actually spent most of my time writing fiction. There is just less of it to show. I take criticism, essays, and other non-fiction pieces very seriously, but fiction has always been what consumes me the most. When I was in San Francisco writing the Tongue, I was actually there to write a different book, called San Francisco Noir, a kind of critical history of film noir. The contract from the nonfiction book enabled me to live there without having a day job. So I’d write the noir book in the morning, and the novel in the afternoon and evening. For me the two kinds of writing pose different types of challenges. I write fiction in several stages. The first involves heavy note taking, making outlines, and playing out general ideas. The actual writing is a separate process. I think of it like trying to go into a dream, although there is a lot of problem-solving and mechanical work along the way. The third stage, and by far the most important, is editing and revising. More than anything, writing fiction means rewriting fiction. Nonfiction, and critical essays, I think of as logical exercises. Now the two forms bleed into each other between the margins, but they feel like different exercises.

Brink: Going back to the problems of language and communication. You usually write about other people, books, and films. How does it feel to try to convey what you are doing right now?

NR: It has been really difficult to talk about the novel, especially since I didn’t talk to anyone about it for five or six years. It is a surreal feeling to have other people read something that I’ve been working on for so many years. As I said before, the book is not autobiographical in the sense that its story and its characters are not taken from real life. But it is deeply personal, because it reflects all the major things I’ve been thinking about and caring about for the last six years. The themes and the emotions are real, intimate, and personal to me. So it has been strange to talk about the book as an object outside of myself, especially as I am not someone who is very comfortable talking about myself in general. It is also somewhat bewildering to hear opinions about the book, or interpretations that I may or may not have intended.

It has been hard to find the language to talk about the novel. I still don’t really have a good answer to the question, “What’s your novel about?” You’d think I would have figured out the answer years ago, but now I’ve gotten it down to something like, “Boy falls in love with girl, girl disappears in Italy, boy has to find the girl.” This is so crazily reductive that it does not seem to describe the book at all. I am at a loss in the way that I would not be if you asked me about my film noir book. But this is one of the great things about fiction. The writer goes half way and the reader goes half way. The quality of a book depends as much on the reader’s intelligence and the perspicacity and engagement and interest as it does on the book itself.

Brink: What were some of the day-to-day challenges you faced as your tried to wrap up the novel? Was it a struggle to finish?

NR: It never felt like a struggle. It did feel like a very long process, but I enjoyed the process tremendously. That, unfortunately, is probably one of the reasons why it took as long as it did. As far as technical problems that I encountered, the largest was probably trying to make the story move quickly and smoothly. I had to cut out numerous excessive and digressive passages. The prologue, for instance, was originally forty pages. It ended up at ten pages. I also was at great pains to ensure that the two plots were always synchronous—in mood, theme, and motif. Each section is next to its neighboring sections for a reason. Whether or not those reasons are successfully conveyed to the reader is another thing altogether. I tried to avoid creating an expectation that the two stories were going to come together in the end, and to ensure that the stories interacted with each other at each stage along the way.

Brink: This question of maturity is an interesting one. Authors who are both your peers and much older than you are saying that your book is well beyond your years, something well beyond what they expect someone your age to produce. What challenges does that kind of praise for your work mean for you and for your career as a novelist?

NR: I just tried to write the best, most honest book I could write. There may be fantastical elements along the way, but the characters’ emotions and relationships seem, to me at least, extremely real. I’ve always been a student of first novels, especially first novels by writers I admire. There are certain conventions that you see cropping up again and again in these books. I knew what they were going into this process, and I tried hard to resist them. But I realized pretty quickly that one of the characters was going to have to be a young man living in New York. No matter how had I tried, I couldn’t get rid of him. What I could do, though, was to resist convention whenever possible and focus on the larger themes and issues of the story I wanted to tell.

I wanted to avoid writing a hyper-realistic, controlled, clean, respectable novel. I wanted to do something strange. I’m sure I’ve got a long way to go to mature as a writer and to mature as a person. But I’d much rather be over-ambitious than conventional, and that’s something that I am proud of with this book. Maybe that’s a mark of youth, but I hope not. I hope that anything I write in the future will live up to the quality of the books that mean the most to me.

Brink: We can’t avoid this question because you come from the family that you do. Your father is Frank Rich of The New York Times and your brother is also a very successful humor writer. How does it feel to come from such a literary family? Did you feel a lot of pressure to be successful as well?

NR: My mother still sends me the news stories about the bonuses of hedge fund managers—you know, in case I want to try on a different career. But no, my parents never put any pressure on me to follow any particular career path. It’s true that both of their careers involved writing—my father wrote theater reviews and my mother was an editor of nonfiction books. But I never felt that I was growing up in some sort of rarified literary world. My world was listening to eighties hair bands, reading horror novels, hanging out with friends, and watching Mets’ games, and crying when they lost. I suppose the subject of my family makes a convenient hook for someone who wants to write about me—particularly if the writer hasn’t read my novel. But my brother and my father do very different things from what I do. They’re excellent at what they do, I’m proud of what they’ve accomplished, but I know I couldn’t do it.

Brink: A question about what life is like in the world of literary criticism: As writer for The New York Review of Books and the The New York Times Book Review, you are part of the increasing phenomenon of young people involved in book criticism. How does a young person get involved in the world of literary criticism?

NR: Book criticism has always been the best way for a young writer get their first byline. You don’t need to have much expertise in order to get an assignment, and book review editors tend to be open to giving pieces to young writers. Unfortunately this is becoming more difficult these days because book reviews are dying out, as newspapers are cutting pages. My first serious piece was a book review for the Los Angeles Times Book Review (which just folded last week as a stand-alone section). I sent the editor a note saying that I was an intern at The New York Review of Books, and that I had an idea for a book review. My advice is to propose a review of a new novel by a young writer that you think is deserving of coverage, but which an editor wouldn’t necessarily know to assign, because the writer isn’t yet prominent.

Brink: Any plans for future novels?

NR: I am working on something now with the tentative title of FutureWorld.

Brink: There’s a title? It’s not a secret this time around?

NR: I am much less secretive about this one, which might prove to be a total disaster if it ends up failing, which is always possible. I am in the very early stages. It takes place in the near future, and is about a man and his city; both get in a lot of trouble.

Brink: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure, and good luck on the current project.

NR: Thanks, it’s been good talking to you.